“If everybody wrote on every wall…” Dean of Campus Life Anne Lundquist leaves the sentence hanging. A picture of our campus’ buildings covered with dripping tags, psychedelic motifs, and Led Zeppelin lyrics scribbles itself into my mind. The image is not wholly unappealing. Campus Life disagrees. Last week the office arranged meetings with students on the first and third floors of Binford to establish community agreements about graffiti in their dorm.
According to first-year Will Metcalf, who lives on the third floor of Binford, many students were opposed to removing their “art.”
“Most people were not bothered by it,” he said. “It should stay there. It’s our space.”
Letting the graffiti remain wasn’t one of the options students had. Everyone could either agree to chip in and clean up the bathrooms themselves, or pay the fines as a group for having the bathroom revamped. Judging by the layers of peeling beige paint in the stalls, it won’t be the first time the school has dealt with graffiti.
“Aaah, bathroom politics,” someone has scrawled in ballpoint on the inside of a door on the first floor. In the next stall there is a picture of former Associate Dean of Campus Life Jodi Gill labeled with an unprintable epithet.
The administration has proposed an alternate medium for students to express their opinions in the bathroom stalls: pieces of paper taped to the stalls’ doors. While it is an accommodating suggestion, graffiti on paper misses the entire point. Writing on a wall suggests permanence and significance. Writing on a piece of paper suggests the trashcan.
Q: When does your childhood end? When does the future begin?
A: In college-pass me another beer bong!
—-1st floor women’s bathroom, Binford
The perpetrators of petty vandalism aren’t so different from legitimate writers. Vandals aim to entertain, to inform, and to be remembered. Bathroom stalls provide the only democratic forum for their work: truly, no talent or message is required to make your voice heard here.
From the infamous “Here I sit, broken-hearted….” to the bizarre “The groundhog has a fake ID” to the pseudo-poetic “When everything under a tree is purple/you know there’s more than that, the scrawling on the walls of Binford’s bathrooms certainly provokes thought in the mind of the man on the can.
Who, for instance, would write “Frailty, thy name is woman” in the women’s bathroom? What motivated someone to tag “Agent”? Should “Farts be free”?
Death by constantly shifting.
—-1st floor men’s bathroom, Binford
Painting over graffiti won’t stop people from writing it. If anything, a blank wall encourages vandals by providing a clean, untouched canvas.
If the administration wants to end vandalism, they must provide students with a real means to make their voice heard. Student involvement in school politics is negligible: though we have the chance to speak up about policies in open forums, our comments are about as influential as the cruel cartoons of administrators drawn on the bathroom walls. And now, we are forced to paint over those.
The sub-text of bathroom graffiti reveals a bigger issue facing the college. As Guilford expands, it finds itself caught between appealing to prospective students and keeping current students enrolled.
The college’s attempts to reinvent itself as a more conservative institution have helped attract a wider range of applicants, but with a retention rate of only 70% for first-years, the administration clearly needs to find a way to keep the students who are here happy. Destruction of property is not committed by students who love their school.
Students who write on the bathroom walls are clearly trying to say something. My guess is that it’s a lot more interesting than a scatological limerick.